A/N: Thank you very much for your kind response to the first chapter! I know it took me quite some time to write the second, but this story (and the characters…) has a life of its own, and all I can do is to follow its flow. Anyway, I do hope you enjoy this—feedback is love, as always, and I do not own anyone or anything in the story, except for the idea itself.
He walks into the kitchen, checks the cupboards for coffee, finds none—Irene has really done her homework. The fridge is stacked with fresh, healthy food, lots of vegetables and dairy, some chicken. There's fresh bread laid out under a glass cover by the toaster, a lump of butter with a small, round-tipped knife resting beside it; he spots a small, glass bowl with some oval, brown pills in it. Irene left a sticky note on the table next to it, saying simply "Herbal sedatives".
It makes him feel like a patient in a mental hospital.
It makes him feel cared for and protected, in a bizarre, twisted way.
He wraps a sheet around himself and sits on a low lounge sofa, fingering through a stack of last week's newspapers. Some pages have been removed, and he's pretty sure they contained articles referring to his spectacular jump. Mental hospital all over again.
He turns the TV on, but apparently the signal has been cut off. There's a vast collection of DVDs piling up underneath the flat screen, though; he passes over some costume dramas (fervently hoping they are Irene friend's, not Irene's) and settles for Doctor Who, dry swallowing a couple of herbal pills on an empty stomach.
Irene wakes him up with a light touch of her hand to his forehead. "Have you eaten?"
He blinks, surprised to find the screen blank (the DVD has apparently finished playing some time ago) and the light outside the window already fading. "I don't cook."
"Perhaps you should consider picking it up. After all, it is the first day of the rest of your life."
"Really, Irene? Isn't that a tad too cliché?"
"Not in this case, no." She leaves him and walks into the kitchen, turns the light on. She looks tired, with dark circles under her eyes and pale lips, but moves purposefully, shoes lost in the corridor and the sleeves of her blouse rolled up to her elbows. Sherlock observes her with half-closed eyes, head hanging over the arm of the sofa.
He should be bored to death due to lack of problems to solve. He should be craving something—food, cigarette, his violin, work, stupid TV programmes to mock.
Instead, he feels numb. Cold. Even more detached from the outside world than usual.
Irene pulls a sharp-looking knife from some secret hiding place, and starts chopping the tomatoes. "You could at least pretend to help," she says without any real reproach. Sherlock gets up and walks over to the kitchen, perching himself on the table where she sat the day before.
"Already regretting bringing me here?" he asks, watching the shadows dance on her face, obscuring her eyes as she shakes her head.
"I don't do regrets, Sherlock. But you might, from what I've seen."
"How so?" he frowns, for once not quite able to follow her reasoning.
She puts the knife down and leans forward, facing away from him, her body weight suspended on stretched arms. His eyes follow the elegant line of her back, imagining it under the professional white of the blouse.
"You don't want to be here, Sherlock. You've lost control over your life; you lost the game, and it's making you crazy. Perhaps you don't feel it yet—but you will, soon enough. And then you'll despise me for keeping you here. You'll want to go out, to be out—and we both know that can't happen, at least not yet."
"How long do you intend to keep me here, then?" he presses on, grabbing a piece of a carrot and chewing on it furiously. Irene arches her eyebrows.
"As long as I deem necessary."
He's not sure if being completely at her mercy is such a good idea, but there's something inside his head blocking the insistent stream of his thoughts, cooling him down. "And what would you have me do, seeing that I'm to be imprisoned here for an undefined amount of time?"
There's no real bite in his voice, just resignation, and from a flash of concern in Irene's eyes Sherlock knows she's just as troubled by the fact as him.
She hands him a plastic bag with something troublingly green inside. "You can rinse the snow peas."
She makes 'something Chinese' and Sherlock frowns at it, before taking an experimental bite and finding that, first, it's quite tasty, and second, he's positively famished. They eat it silence, put the plates into the dishwasher and turn the TV back on, resuming what seems to be turning into a spontaneous Doctor Who marathon. Sherlock feels slightly dizzy, and tired, exhausted even, though he hadn't actually done anything strenuous, physically or intellectually. He simply sits in his corner of the sofa, feet put up on the seat, and watches Irene curl around a big, red pillow as she carefully follows the show.
"If you could travel in time and space," she asks as the end credits of the second episode start rolling in, "where would you go?"
It's speculation. He should hate it, and he does, but he's far too far gone to protest against the sentiment. "Oh, there are so many possibilities… Back into childhood, to strangle my brother. Or to that moment in the lab when Molly first introduced me to Moriarty." He presses his lips together at the thought of that fateful mistake. "Or two months into the future, to see how it all turns out."
"Two months may be too early."
"I certainly hope not. What about you? Where, or when, would you go?"
Irene shrugs, keeping her eyes fixed on the screen. "Somewhere warm, and far away. Not necessarily in a different time."
"Really? I would have thought you might have gone and set a different password on that camera-phone of yours, for one."
"Why would I want to change it? It was the truth."
"One that made you lose the game."
"So? Didn't you lose your game because of the truth?"
He did, and she's right, but he'd never willingly admit it. "The lack of it, I'd say."
"Same thing, in the end." She sits up, pauses the episode. "Do you want to keep on watching this? I think I'll turn in early."
"Why? An early start tomorrow? Some urgent business to take care of?" he spats, feeling quite jealous of her having a purpose, a goal, somewhere to go to in the morning, something to do, other than watching TV series and taking pills.
"Just one. Well?"
He reaches over for the remote, turns the TV off. "Let's sleep. But no more of those herbal drugs, thank you. I don't like the taste of them."
They skip the pretence and go to bed together this time, falling asleep on the opposite sides.
He has yet another dream, of gunmen and explosions, of blood and body parts, of Mrs. Hudson's eyes frozen in an image of horror and surprise, of John's head bashed in, of…
She wakes him up, holds him, lets him hide his face in her shoulder until the wave of dry, tearless sobs passes completely.
"I need you," he says against her skin, shaking and sweating, and hating himself for being so miserably weak.
"I know," she answers and pushes him onto his back, straddling his hips.
It's embarrassingly short, mechanical and emotionless, and he knows now why people call it a type of gymnastics. He also knows Irene didn't enjoy it, but when he moves his hand to touch her, to repay the favour, she pushes his fingers away.
"Leave it be," she murmurs, curling into a ball on her side, facing away from him—but doesn't protest when his arm snakes around her waist.
The touch of her skin calms him down much better than any amount of sex could.
Perhaps that's what she really meant when she'd asked him to have dinner with her. Perhaps not.
"You never said where you're going tomorrow," he points out some time later, sleep slowly closing in on him. Irene leans into him, skin on skin, one simple move bringing them closer, physically if not emotionally. They don't cuddle—they share the other's personal space, and it's far more significant than anything lovers usually do.
She's silent for so long he loses hope for an answer, and lets himself succumb to sleep.
In the end, he's not quite sure if the two words she whispers are real, or just a part of his dream.
"Your funeral."
TBC...